Cellphones and the death of cricket

Call it coincidence or fate, but life has a way of strangely connecting incidents years down the line.

Thirteen years ago, Delhi Police chief Neeraj Kumar was marking his time as the joint director of the Economic Offences Wing in the CBI. The year was 2000 and Kumar was yet to attain fame or infamy, although one can safely say that his relationship with the media was more affable than it is now.

But Kumar missed out on all the action when his colleagues in the more glamourous branch of the CBI — the Special Crimes Division — were handed over the probe into the match-fixing scandal that was making waves across the world.

This happened when the Delhi Police caught South African captain Hansie Cronje red-handed fixing one-day matches with India. This unearthing of an international racket was a massive achievement of the Delhi Police that somewhat redeemed itself as a force usually associated with pot-bellied, lathi-wielding constables.

The Ministry of Sports soon asked the CBI to probe the Indian players who may be involved. That’s where Kumar’s colleagues in Special Crimes got into action and started hogging the headlines when they began calling the likes of Mohammad Azharuddin, Ajay Jadeja and Nayan Mongia in for questioning.

As Kumar was far too ambitious to just watch from the sidelines, he proceeded to make, what the then CBI director RK Raghavan described, as “the most significant breakthrough in the inquiry”. He traced MK, a bookie who knew it all, and worked on him to cooperate with investigations. This turned out to be gold for the CBI as MK, a Delhi-based jeweller by day, started singing to the detectives about how he started ‘fixing’ matches in the early ’90s by buying a Maruti Gypsy for one cricketer and then by paying Rs 5 lakh for a meeting with another in a Delhi hotel.

This achievement went into Kumar’s ACR (Annual Confidential Report) file for keeps and he may have looked back on it with pride this week as he was determined to stir things on the cricketing front again.

The tip-off about Rajasthan Royal team members indulging in spot-fixing couldn’t have come at a better time. The media that once adored him was routinely calling for his resignation given Delhi’s spiralling crime and the police’s inability to especially control violent crimes against women. Kumar also has a few more months to go before he retires.

And every other day, reporters are tipped off about how he’s been asked to go on leave — not because of the recent rape cases but because he couldn’t control protesters who stormed the residence of his boss and Union home minister Sushilkumar Shinde.

So while 13 years ago Kumar was happy to just receive a letter of appreciation from the CBI director, this time he accepted credit, beaming during a carefully-orchestrated press conference, and cracking jokes through it all.

But, it would do Kumar good to flip through the report that his old colleagues filed regarding the 2000 match fixing case, because that is relevant with what’s happening now.
Just as the police now claim that Sreesanth confessed to giving away 14 extra runs in one over in exchange for lakhs, the CBI said the same of players like Azharuddin and Manoj Prabhakar in 2000. Then, like now, they also claimed to have call data records to show calls made before and after matches. Then, like now, the underworld seemed to be controlling the players from abroad.

There’s a difference between the two cases though. And in that difference lies the key — while Sreesanth is already booked for cheating and conspiracy, in 2000, despite the CBI’s conviction that there was match-fixing, no case was made out, no chargesheet, not even an FIR.

The advice from the then solicitor general Harish Salve and other legal experts made the CBI conclude that “the facts of inquiry in the instant case do not constitute an offence under the aforesaid sections of law.” The only thing they weakly suggested was that those players also employed by government departments could be booked under Prevention of Corruption Act. Obviously, no one took that route.

What has changed since then? There’s still no match-fixing law in the country and I fail to see if throwing a game wasn’t considered cheating by Salve and the CBI back then, how will the Delhi Police get a different legal opinion now?

Perhaps Kumar will be more persuasive in making his case and with that perhaps he will finally change the sad state of cricket which then CBI investigating officer MA Ganapathy eloquently described in his report: “The romanticism associated with the game is perhaps gone forever. Increasingly, in the playing fields around the world, the music of sweetly timed strokes is being replaced by the harsh cacophony of ringing cell phones.’’

Sunetra  Choudhury is an anchor/reporter for NDTV and is the author of the election travelogue Braking News.